


Too Dim and Distant To See

by Walking_Pillar_of_Salt



Category: Death Note & Related Fandoms, Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Unnecessary Biblical References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 04:20:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10801578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Walking_Pillar_of_Salt/pseuds/Walking_Pillar_of_Salt
Summary: L stares at Light.Or, of slipping, and cliffs, and looking down.





	Too Dim and Distant To See

L was raised in Britain, underneath the façades of tradition and the great stone walls of antiquity, and, as a result, knows the English language and tradition intimately. He knows other languages and their histories as well, of course — L would daresay that makes a habit of knowing things — but there’s always immediate leap of intuition that’s present with the language that suckled him, that reared him in the absence of parental affection in the darker nights of his childhood. There was a rather unfortunate dearth of literature at the orphanage in which he raised, but, in the older parts of London, where the Thames runs immortal, there’s no shortage of Bibles — no shortage, despite the lack of jobs, money, or happiness at all, in faith. 

“The serpent said to the woman, ‘You surely will not die! "For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” L had read, one evening, as the others ran about the unforgiving concrete hole they'd dubbed a yard and he tried to forget the scrapes on his knees.

Knowing good? L had wondered, in the complex simplicity of his childhood mind. Surely _good,_ as a force, fleeting as opaque sunbeams, as the warmth of sleep chased away by the cold of waking, was unknowable; it never stuck around for long enough for L, as he desperately chased it into secluded orphanage corners, to see its face. Whammy, later, away from the orphanage, when he’d swaddled L in blankets and the steaming warmth of teas, showed L the goodness that other people had captured, adorning books, paintings, and the hanging red-ruby-gold trees in Whammy’s garden. But L wondered, as the leaves hit his cheeks and Whammy stood by his side, where this goodness was when he needed it, and why he couldn’t find it in his chest when he looked.

L knew that he wasn’t a good person, even as he worked as a detective, even as Whammy and the world held his hands and said that he was, lying through his coffee-yellow teeth. L refused cases on a whim, dooming individuals to suffer because he didn’t feel like sacrificing an hour of his time. He was mercurial, impetuous, _childish_ in his worst moments, and sometimes in his best. But he loved being a detective in a way that he loved few other things, and detective work became a looming mistress to whom he was beholden, fostering in him a morality he didn't quite know what to do with, at first. 

 _Someone should kill that man,_ he thought, at 14, when he’d just started calling himself L and watched a serial rapist and murderer walk off with ten years in prison instead of the death penalty. 

 _Someone needs to kill that man_ , he thought, at 17, when the first of Whammy’s students died while undercover as he felt the cold whisper of vengeance seep through the gaps between his ribs.

 _I want to kill that man_ , he thinks, at 24, as Kira slaughtered multitudes and he couldn't do a damn thing to stop it. 

 _How must it feel,_ L thinks, as he watches Light pour through the police databases for hints to solve his own crimes, _to never question your own morality?_

L believed he was right because he stopped criminals, saved people, and stopped cities from bleeding. But, if he held the Death Note, held its sleek promise and quiet might in his hands, he knew that he would likely succumb once, or twice, or however many times he felt an exception should be made. He would kill to keep criminals from killing again, to keep from having to interview young women with smeared mascara and clothing torn in strange places, to keep from watching the world burn; and that is why, he thinks, as Light sleeps at his side and his cold feet dig into L’s shin, that goodness is unknowable, even as he is right. 

L does not know the line he would draw to fulfill the might of his ideals — does not know if he would stop at murder, or at genocide, or at whatever line Kira has drawn for himself, too dim and distant to see in this hazy black.

 _How must it feel,_ L wonders, as he tells the Japanese police and FBI and anyone who will listen that Kira is a mass murderer, _to believe that your worst whims are honorable — that the insuperable might of your instincts is a normative moral force?_

 _How must it feel,_ L thinks, looking into the honey of Light’s eyes as Light tries to hold back the red that L can see seeping through, _to give the world your vengeance and have it portray it just?_

 _You, Light Yagami,_ L thinks, as he looks down the endless pit where his moral questions lie and prays that he is good, _are the creature in the abyss._

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for another fic, but I couldn't quite get it to fit. Here's the fic in question, if you're interested:
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/10742370


End file.
